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Don't bother, if that's your attitude. I'm not just an entity floating in the ether. I have an identity. Just because you don't want to acknowledge it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Wow.

Alright, here's where I get confused. Being any of the things LGBT stands for is normal and there's nothing wrong, blah blah, yet treating it like it's normal seems to have offended you. I don't want to sit around and talk to someone about how straight they are either. If I don't latch onto that one aspect of you it's not denying your experience, it's starting with less intimate topics of similar interest.

My dude in Dragon Age accidentally hooked up with a male prostitute. Not what I meant to do, but I laughed and carried on. Is that gay?

Yes.

Going back to the 1-3% thing, I like to think that about 1-3% of the pedestrians I run over in Grand Theft Auto are LGBT, and about 1-3% of the Toads in the Mushroom Kingdom are too. It's just that the former are too busy being run over to tell me about it, and the latter don't talk about their sexuality, regardless of orientation.

But those are NPCs. For protagonists, sure, there aren't nearly as many LGBT game protagonists as there "should be," if protagonists were people who were randomly selected from the general population. But that's the thing: fictional characters aren't randomly selected; they are created. If you got 100 character designers to each make a character, with the instructions of making that character an average person, you would not get 1-3 LGBT characters out of that, because they are not average characters.

Now, if instead of instructing those character designers to make an average person, you told them to just make a person, then perhaps you would expect more to be LGBT. I don't know.

Maybe I can say what I mean better with an analogy. Say you're playing Final Fantasy Tactics (and good on you for that). You set up an attack and it shows up as having a 97% chance to hit. If you as a single player set up and execute that attack 100 times, you would expect to miss 3 of those times. On the other hand, if you sat 100 different people down to execute that same attack just once each, every single one of them will be expecting to hit. You will not get 97 people who expect to hit and 3 people who expect to miss. An outside observer of this exercise would expect that 97 people would land a hit and 3 would miss, but each individual player would not expect to be the one to miss.

To bring that back to character design, you have 100 designers each making a character. Even if they all know the math and believe that about 3% of the game protagonists should end up LGBT just by pure chance, each individual designer does not believe that he is the one to make an LGBT game protagonist.

Going back to the 1-3% thing, I like to think that about 1-3% of the pedestrians I run over in Grand Theft Auto are LGBT, and about 1-3% of the Toads in the Mushroom Kingdom are too. It's just that the former are too busy being run over to tell me about it, and the latter don't talk about their sexuality, regardless of orientation.

But those are NPCs. For protagonists, sure, there aren't nearly as many LGBT game protagonists as there "should be," if protagonists were people who were randomly selected from the general population. But that's the thing: fictional characters aren't randomly selected; they are created. If you got 100 character designers to each make a character, with the instructions of making that character an average person, you would not get 1-3 LGBT characters out of that, because they are not average characters.

Now, if instead of instructing those character designers to make an average person, you told them to just make a person, then perhaps you would expect more to be LGBT. I don't know.

Maybe I can say what I mean better with an analogy. Say you're playing Final Fantasy Tactics (and good on you for that). You set up an attack and it shows up as having a 97% chance to hit. If you as a single player set up and execute that attack 100 times, you would expect to miss 3 of those times. On the other hand, if you sat 100 different people down to execute that same attack just once each, every single one of them will be expecting to hit. You will not get 97 people who expect to hit and 3 people who expect to miss. An outside observer of this exercise would expect that 97 people would land a hit and 3 would miss, but each individual player would not expect to be the one to miss.

To bring that back to character design, you have 100 designers each making a character. Even if they all know the math and believe that about 3% of the game protagonists should end up LGBT just by pure chance, each individual designer does not believe that he is the one to make an LGBT game protagonist.

For me, I just don't care. Most developers probably don't care. People tend to write/design what they happen to be subject matter experts on. It's just not something that ever crosses my mind. I'm not trying to be insensitive, it's just that outside my own bedroom, I don't care who is fucking who.

Wait, I thought Analoge was a woman. Or is "he" her prefered pronoun? Or his. I'm fucking confused.

Originally Posted by DpadJoe

It's not about hamfisting it in, it doesn't need to be like that it can be done like any other love interest storyline. Also "I get that the inclusion is nice for people in these communities " is very patronising, this is not about randomly shoving gay characters in this is about the fact that out of all the tens of thousands of games released 99% only deal with straight relationships, the fact that people in the game universe may not be straight is ignored the fact that there may be transgender people is ignored, not for one game but for EVERY game.

Maybe visibility could solve that? I wouldn't talk about trans people in a game I made because I don't really talk about them most of the time. I don't even see them.

I will drawn a line under the arguing on the previous thread, I disagree with the replies to my last post and could reply with astute responses back, but this page is actually turning into a interesting debate so I really want to stick with that.

Originally Posted by Dexter345

Yes.

Going back to the 1-3% thing, I like to think that about 1-3% of the pedestrians I run over in Grand Theft Auto are LGBT, and about 1-3% of the Toads in the Mushroom Kingdom are too. It's just that the former are too busy being run over to tell me about it, and the latter don't talk about their sexuality, regardless of orientation.

But those are NPCs. For protagonists, sure, there aren't nearly as many LGBT game protagonists as there "should be," if protagonists were people who were randomly selected from the general population. But that's the thing: fictional characters aren't randomly selected; they are created. If you got 100 character designers to each make a character, with the instructions of making that character an average person, you would not get 1-3 LGBT characters out of that, because they are not average characters.

Now, if instead of instructing those character designers to make an average person, you told them to just make a person, then perhaps you would expect more to be LGBT. I don't know.

Maybe I can say what I mean better with an analogy. Say you're playing Final Fantasy Tactics (and good on you for that). You set up an attack and it shows up as having a 97% chance to hit. If you as a single player set up and execute that attack 100 times, you would expect to miss 3 of those times. On the other hand, if you sat 100 different people down to execute that same attack just once each, every single one of them will be expecting to hit. You will not get 97 people who expect to hit and 3 people who expect to miss. An outside observer of this exercise would expect that 97 people would land a hit and 3 would miss, but each individual player would not expect to be the one to miss.

To bring that back to character design, you have 100 designers each making a character. Even if they all know the math and believe that about 3% of the game protagonists should end up LGBT just by pure chance, each individual designer does not believe that he is the one to make an LGBT game protagonist.

This is an interesting angle to look at it from, it does make an excellent coherent case for why LGBT characters are lacking in gaming. Although this does not explain why gaming has such a significant drop off of LGBT characters compared to every other medium, video games do deal with romantic stories so it is very noticeable.

Originally Posted by digtastik

For me, I just don't care. Most developers probably don't care. People tend to write/design what they happen to be subject matter experts on. It's just not something that ever crosses my mind. I'm not trying to be insensitive, it's just that outside my own bedroom, I don't care who is fucking who.

Just a quick note, it's not just about who's fucking who relationships are so much more than that there is romance, intimacy, passion very few video games capture this at the moment but it is possible, The Darkness is a really good example of this.

This is an interesting angle to look at it from, it does make an excellent coherent case for why LGBT characters are lacking in gaming. Although this does not explain why gaming has such a significant drop off of LGBT characters compared to every other medium, video games do deal with romantic stories so it is very noticeable.

That's one other thing that I meant to bring up earlier. I don't think that other mediums are doing a very good job in this area. I've seen Brokeback Mountain and Glee cited for the case of Hollywood doing better, but those are still just a handful of examples in a sea of movies and TV shows. Do you really think that movies and television are representing 1-3% of their characters as LGBT? Videogames may be doing worse on that front, but I don't think movies and TV are actually doing well.

Just a quick note, it's not just about who's fucking who relationships are so much more than that there is romance, intimacy, passion very few video games capture this at the moment but it is possible, The Darkness is a really good example of this.

And you thought you had to point that out because?...

Of course Dig knows that, and what he meant is pretty obvious: most people don't have that much contact with LGBT issues so they just don't think about it. And that's exactly the point.

I'd be interested in seeing honest statistics for gender/orientation of created characters in series like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. And maybe Skyrim.

To be frank, Commander Shepard is genderless, so I don't know how they'd begin to measure that. Sure, you can be a guy or a girl and be gay, straight or bi but that said, Femshep doesn't get a girls night out and BroShep does not get poker night with the guys. They get the same social experience with different pronouns,. I realize this is mostly done for the ease and safety of keeping the narrative consistent because there are so many choices that might get referenced later in another game and they don't want to make a complex narrative more complicated.

That said, I find Skyrim's weirdly bisexual culture easier to swallow than DA2's cast because Skyrim has hundreds upon hundreds more NPCs scurrying about with their own lives and schedules - do you want to write and decide each and every one of these character's sexualities or risk fucking it up and offending people? Skyrim being a power fantasy tends to alleviate its weirdness. Like many things in the game, marriage is a small footnote. Take the guy or gal you want and go - you have hundreds of dungeons and dragons to be worrying about. That and Skyrim lives off its lore more than character based interactions.

They're two different beasts, really. The Mass Effect team wants fleshed out characters and a focused narrative, Bethesda Game Studios lets lore take precedence and gives you a power fantasy within that.

That's one other thing that I meant to bring up earlier. I don't think that other mediums are doing a very good job in this area. I've seen Brokeback Mountain and Glee cited for the case of Hollywood doing better, but those are still just a handful of examples in a sea of movies and TV shows. Do you really think that movies and television are representing 1-3% of their characters as LGBT? Videogames may be doing worse on that front, but I don't think movies and TV are actually doing well.

I don't think there doing a great job especially in the way of diverse LGBT characters but to be honest they don't have to do that much to be better than games, seen as games don't (with maybe a couple of mediocre exceptions) deal with it at all. I can't tell you if the percentage of movies/tv shows including gay character is 1-3% I don't know but I do know there are a lot for examples: Will and Grace, Sex in the City, Hollyoaks, EastEnders Queer as Folk, The L word and tons more. In fact there are two different version of Queer as Folk that deal with the subject specifically so I think we are represented numerically well enough, quality of the representation is a different very complicated subject though.

Edit: Although there is a distinct lack of Trans characters in the mediums of TV, Movies, Games and even when they are represented it is usually in a negative way.

You walked into the Sarkeesian-Unwinnable-Juxtaposition argument, Observe.

He doesn't want his identity to be acknowledged by Bioware yet you are to acknowledge his identity under the same terms as Bioware would, ACCEPTIVE DISMISSAL IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!11

First off, I'm not a "he." I would give you the benefit of the doubt that you do not know that because you are new, if that fact that I am a trans woman were not plastered heavily throughout this thread. I can only come to one of two conclusions. Either you are aware of my identity and are intentionally mispronouning me (in which case, a simple "fuck you" will suffice as my response to this post and you can disregard what follows), or you have not read the whole thread you're commenting in, which makes it extra silly that you're trying to sum up my argument in over simplistic terms.

Secondly, having your identity acknowledged by an individual who is trying to interact with you in real life is in no way similar to having someone who is supposed to represent what you identify as appear in a multi-katrillion dollar RPG franchise and misrepresent you to millions of players around world. Get serious.

First off, I'm not a "he." I would give you the benefit of the doubt that you do not know that because you are new, if that fact that I am a trans woman were not plastered heavily throughout this thread. I can only come to one of two conclusions. Either you are aware of my identity and are intentionally mispronouning me (in which case, a simple "fuck you" will suffice as my response to this post and you can disregard what follows), or you have not read the whole thread you're commenting in, which makes it extra silly that you're trying to sum up my argument in over simplistic terms.

Secondly, having your identity acknowledged by an individual who is trying to interact with you in real life is in no way similar to having someone who is supposed to represent what you identify as appear in a multi-katrillion dollar RPG franchise and misrepresent you to millions of players around world. Get serious.

And this is more or less exactly what I was getting at. You'll gladly defame the "exclusion" of LGBT sensitive character but when it's handled poorly you'll defame them usually even moreso. There's really no win in this kind of situation, except it's way easier to get away with the exclusion because there's no real case for it, you're just pointing fingers. Hence why a lot of developers probably just think it's better to avoid it completely.

That said, not as a personal attack, but that first paragraph comes off as prickly at best. I get that as a transgender woman there's a lot of discrimination against you, but I sincerely doubt being that aggressive in a response to potential ignorance is going to help anything at all.

Generally 9/10 I would agree with you but with sensitive subjects such as race, gender identity, sexism and sexuality it's always best to check. As I said the vast majority of time I would agree with you on that but I would say there are exceptions.

So why did you try to simplify it into "I don't care who is fucking who." I understand what your are trying to say and maybe it's just me being a bit pedantic but that is major simplifying of relationships as this is about much more than that.